- AI
- Design
AI as a creative partner: enhancing user experience in product design
June 11 — 2025
As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes industries across the board, digital product designers face a pivotal question: how can we harness various AI tools to unlock greater creativity? This challenge has sparked extensive research, uncovering promising strategies that could transform creative workflows entirely.
Rethinking the foundations of design in the AI era
Digital product design has long stood on four core pillars: collaboration, prototyping (functional mockups and design systems), applying proven theories, and creativity. AI integration isn't about replacing these foundational elements—it's about amplifying and enriching them.
This paradigm shift reframes the designer's role as a conductor, ensuring AI draws from credible, validated theories and insights. Rather than dictating our actions, artificial intelligence becomes a catalyst that unleashes designers' creative potential. AI can transform the design process in several ways: boosting task execution efficiency, deepening our understanding of design principles, automating repetitive work to create space for strategic thinking, and amplifying creativity as our uniquely human contribution.
Tools that amplify creativity
Putting this approach into practice requires complementary tools that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows. Scout, Mirego's proprietary platform for secure conversations with various language models, streamlines the creation of custom AI assistants. These assistants can be fine-tuned with specific guidelines rooted in design and gamification theories—like Norman, our assistant configured to leverage this theoretical foundation.
Consider this real-world example: designing a web platform to showcase Canadian clothing brands while incorporating e-commerce functionality and a loyalty program to foster community engagement.
Using Scout's AI assistant, we generated three distinct, theory-backed approaches. The first took a community-driven path, leveraging gamification through loyalty programs and user rankings. The second embraced minimalism, focusing on brand storytelling and aesthetics with an emotion-based loyalty system grounded in dual coding theory. The third explored a tech-forward direction, centering on AI-powered personalized recommendations using Fogg's persuasion model.
Once we've settled on our final approach, tools like Relume can take the work further by rapidly generating site architectures and functional wireframes. These platforms transform written briefs into tangible visual structures, enabling quick concept iteration and dramatically streamlining the design process.
Within minutes, our generated briefs became comprehensive, structured sitemaps containing all essential components: homepage, about section, community hub with user rankings, loyalty program features, and dedicated navigation and e-commerce sections. Converting these into detailed wireframes required just a single click, leveraging component libraries to maintain structural consistency throughout. The ability to tweak and refine every element on the fly showcases the remarkable agility this approach offers.
AI won't replace designers
Testing these tools reveals a nuanced reality. The benefits are substantial: significant time savings through near-instant iterations, faster exploration that generates more ideas within the same timeframe, freed-up bandwidth for strategic thinking, and expanded horizons for exploring new opportunities.
However, several challenges surface along the way. There's a steep learning curve that requires plenty of trial and error to master these tools effectively. Output quality hinges heavily on prompt quality. Each AI model interprets requests differently, demanding constant adaptation. Fine-tuning prompts requires considerable time investment to achieve optimal results.
An experimental mindset proves crucial when working with these rapidly evolving tools. AI doesn't replace human creativity—it amplifies it by freeing designers to focus on their unique strengths: strategic thinking, conceptual innovation, and deep user understanding.
Toward seamless integration
This methodology perfectly demonstrates how AI can blend seamlessly into existing creative workflows. Rather than disrupting established practices, it enhances and accelerates them. The ultimate goal remains the same: creating better digital products that truly serve user needs.
AI becomes another tool in the designer's toolkit, alongside design software and proven methodological frameworks. Our experimentation shows that AI, far from threatening creativity, can become its greatest enabler. By handling repetitive tasks and providing instant access to design theories and best practices, it unlocks creative potential and elevates digital product design to new heights.
In a landscape where AI evolves at breakneck speed, curiosity, experimentation, and knowledge sharing emerge as essential skills for shaping the future of user experience.
